“Ok Max, we have seen what the problem is”. “What can I do to fix it?”. “Nothing, if you can bring the car back to the garage”. This is the dialogue between the Red Bull wall and Max Verstappen in the final of the Bahrain Grand Prix, which ended with one bitter disappointment for the Milton Keynes team, which saw both RB18s knocked out before the finish. The internal investigations by the men under Christian Horner’s orders are continuing in these few days that separate the Circus from the immediate return to the track in Jeddah in Saudi Arabia.
Helmut Marko, joined by the German newspaper Auto Motor und Sport, he ruled out that the manager of the Verstappen and Perez retreats could somehow be the standard pump supplied to all the teams by the Italian company Magneti Marelli. Faced with the hypothesis according to which Verstappen and Perez may have remained dry the Horner team principal at the end of the race categorically denied this thesis because according to the data in the possession of Red Bull, the gasoline was inside the tank. Indeed, such a gross error is unlikely to occur, also because as a result of the neutralization with the entry of the Safety Car, fuel consumption was drastically lowered at the end of the race.
Fuel, however, could be the culprit of the RB18 withdrawals. It should not be forgotten that from this year the fuels used in F1 are 10% ‘bio’ thanks to the inclusion of ethanol in the composition of the petrol used by F1 cars. Red Bull has never simulated a real Grand Prix during testing and may not have come to the point of verifying a hypothesis that should not be underestimated. According to the technical journalist Craig Scarborough, it cannot be ruled out that the volatility of ethanol inside the RB18 tank may have prevented the remaining fuel from being fished from the petrol pump and regularly fed into the feed. Or, another hypothesis formulated leads to damage to the ducts due to a fuel that is too ‘aggressive’. If so, the Exxon Mobil that supplies the fuel to Red Bull would have a lot of work to do to recalibrate the gasoline supplied to the Milton Keynes team. Honda had been the first during the winter to point out that biofuels would be a considerable unknown and a decisive factor in the performance of the 2022 cars. Shell certainly together with Ferrari at the moment seems to have done an excellent job. Petronas and Exxon Mobil could be the ’causes’ on the one hand of less than excellent performance with regard to Mercedes engines, on the other hand of the reliability problems of Red Bull and AlphaTauri.
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